What to do on an exquisitely beautiful mid-spring day? Why, of course ... spend as much of the day as you can out-of-doors. And in this unforeseen era of COVID lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, spend it as close to home as possible. That would mean different things to different people. Depending on your outlook on life, your values, your personal circumstances.

For someone invested in making the most of these warm spring and summer months who enjoys looking at beautiful plants, floral and otherwise, it would mean planting vegetation of various kinds, and most people focus on seasonal, annual flowering plants that work hard all summer long producing beautiful colourful, various-textured flowers.

Irving decided it was time for him to start filling our garden urns and pots. Less of them this year than usual, but not all that much so. We had given away two of our large ceramic garden pots and four of the middling-sized terra cotta pots. Which leaves us with an awful lot of others still to be filled with garden soil and planted with beguiling plants that will flower month after month.

So out Irving went after breakfast, hauled out his wheelbarrow, and bags of soil, sheep manure and peat moss and set to. Because there are so many urns/pots it takes time. When he was finished with as many as could be done in one day without exhausting himself completely, I sprinkled in some bone/blood meal for fertilizer, and got set to begin the planting. On what turned out to be a 20C day with hot sun and light breezes.

 

First the African daisies got planted close to the zinnias I had planted a few days earlier. They'll tend to bush out and produce a lot of blooms, in lovely shades of mauve, pink, red. I usually plant marigolds there, but saw none this year and was captivated by the fresh beautiful appearance of the daisies. I don't think we'll be disappointed.

I planted Canna lilies, begonias, dracaena, potato vine (ipomea) and some New Guinea impatiens, and it soon became clear we'll need more pot fillers, but that's a goal for another day.  It was time to get ourselves and our puppies out to the ravine for an hour or so wandering about the forest trails. And none of us needed jackets for a refreshing change.

 

Down the introductory trail and over to the left to access another trail on a rise opposite and and above the creekbed I happened to turn around and look behind us. There stood the grand old pine we've known since we first entered the ravine, growing on a slant, oddly toward the hill we had just descended, and away from the shoulder of the creekbed. It seems, every year, to slant downward just a tad more. It's still a healthy tree, even if old and gnarly and its roots would be well established, so it's highly unlikely it intends to fall any time soon....toward the center of the trail as it happens.

 When we were on the elevated portion of the main trail, we were admiring some trilliums that had attained a quite substantial size, when I realized that there was something beside the twin trilliums I was then regarding, and the sight of it was unmistakable. The first of the Jack-in-the-Pulpits to emerge from the leafmass of the forest. Always an exciting find for us, because we regard these plants as almost exotic with their single folded-over petal hiding its purple stripes.